How did it all go so wrong?

President Thabo Mbeki offered a grand vision of South Africa's renaissance. He promised to fix the economy and alleviate poverty. But nine years on, he has been forced from office in utter humiliation. Chris McGreal on the story behind his fall

It all began well enough. South Africans, black and white, loved Nelson Mandela. They virtually swooned at his feet, marvelling at his inspiration and example and wondering if the country could have been saved without him. But in 1999, at the end of the great man's five years as president, there was a consensus that his job of unifying the reborn nation was done and what was required was someone who knew how to run a government.

It was the moment that Thabo Mbeki had spent four decades of his life working toward, and South Africa was ready for him. He had been Mandela's deputy president during the previous five years of African National Congress (ANC) rule in the immediate post-apartheid years.

"Mbeki pretty much ran the show from 1994," says Mark Gevisser, author of the most authoritative biography to date of Mbeki. "He was Mandela's de facto prime minister. His approach was very technocratic, about establishing systems of government, and he worked very hard to do that and was effective in many ways. It's what people expected and hoped for from his presidency."

But Mbeki offered more than that. He had laid out his grand vision of his continent's renaissance with his inspiring "I am an African" speech in 1996 as South Africa adopted its post-apartheid constitution. Two years later a conference on the African renaissance followed, and a book. By the time Mbeki took power, it was clear that he intended Africa's revival to be the central thrust of his years in power. He spoke of a new golden era for the continent and predicted this would be the African century.

Andrew Feinstein was a junior ANC member of parliament at the time. "I was never a great Mbeki admirer but I remember sitting on the backbenches of parliament in the first few months of his administration and thinking to myself he's actually the right guy for this time. This is the man we need. And I think it's gone horrifically wrong," he says.

Nine years later, as Mbeki prepares to leave office prematurely, humiliated and rejected by the party he dedicated half a century of his life to, there are few who do not believe he was the architect of his own downfall. The vision of a new Africa has long since been buried under the years of vilification for fiddling with intellectual debate over the origins of Aids while hundreds of thousands of the people died of the disease. The promise of good administration has given way to accusations that he purged state institutions of critics, interfered with the justice system and protected corrupt officials from investigation, most notably the country's police chief, who was accused of links to organised crime and covering up a murder.

Even Mbeki's much vaunted economic policies, which have seen growth and financial stability, are vilified by the people now taking over the country as enriching a new black elite but leaving the mass of poor behind.

And where there was goodwill and support, Mbeki now leaves behind a host of enemies. But it is perhaps fitting that in the end the man most notorious for denying a lifeline to people with Aids should have seen his political career consumed by a virus he planted in South Africa's body politic before he even became president, and which lay unnoticed for years until it came to infect almost everything about Mbeki's administration.

Thabo Mbeki had returned from exile in 1990, when Mandela was released from prison, after transforming the international perception of the ANC from an African liberation movement of dubious ability to a party that was fit to govern. "He was an immensely good salesman for the ANC," says Gevisser. "He seduced the world into loving the ANC and seduced white South Africans in to believing they could have a black president. He did that incredibly well because he was in the service of a greater cause. But once power was his, he wielded it quite uncomfortably. He was susceptible to the kind of politics of plotting and conspiracy that characterised life in exile. And he never really overcame that and I think that was one of his biggest failures."

Feinstein agrees. "There's no doubt that he centralised virtually all control. It was almost Leninist. It was based on the pretext that all power should be vested in the leader and there should be no gainsaying of the leader. The most obvious manifestation of that was on HIV and Aids, where he wouldn't allow any discussion within the ANC caucus on it," he says.

Mbeki saw the disease, like much else, through a racial prism. It was used, he said, to reinforce stereotypes of Africans as primitive and unable to control their lust. The president was a natural target for the dissident scientists who questioned the link between HIV and Aids, punting instead that the disease was the result of poverty. The anti-Aids antiretroviral drugs (ARVs) were poisoning people, they said.

Mbeki was only too willing to be convinced. He began publicly to question the causes of Aids and, under the guise of ensuring the safety of drugs in wide use in the rest of the world, blocked the distribution of ARVs in government hospitals. Tens of thousands of babies who might have been saved were denied the single dose of a cheap drug at birth. Hundreds of thousands of adults were left to die while Mbeki held an intellectual debate, largely with himself, on the merits of drug therapy. Asked in a television interview if he would recommend the use of a condom to prevent catching HIV, Mbeki said that to agree would be to prove a particular paradigm. Most of the country had no idea what he was talking about.

The Anglican archbishop of Cape Town, Njongonkulu Ndungane, described the government's Aids policies as "as serious a crime against humanity as apartheid". One of the country's leading Aids researchers - Malegapuru Makgoba, formerly one of Mbeki's confidants - said the government's inaction was tantamount to genocide. Schoolchildren called Mbeki "Comrade Undertaker".

The largest and most effective civil campaign of the post-apartheid era was launched to get Mbeki to reverse his policies. The president said he was merely seeking an open debate, but those who disagreed with him were publicly vilified. Mbeki accused those who supported the conventional view that the virus could be spread through sexual contact of denigrating black people, and black people who agreed with them as "negroes of enslaved minds".

The ANC distributed a fat document claiming that ARVs were an attempt to commit genocide against black people. The president misrepresented statistics to parliament in an attempt to cut his own government's Aids budget. Amid growing anger at home, and derision abroad that damaged Mbeki's image as a safe pair of hands, the president eventually allowed the life-saving drugs into the hospitals. But he didn't change his mind on Aids, and still hasn't.

"After publicly announcing he was withdrawing from the debate he came back to the ANC caucus and restated that he didn't believe HIV caused Aids and that this was a conspiracy of the pharmaceutical companies and the CIA against him," says Feinstein.

The Aids debacle damaged Mbeki's standing enormously, and was a serious blow to his attempts to change international perceptions of Africa. The statesman was now seen as deeply unstable. It also alienated many former supporters and exposed his style of government. Mbeki surrounded himself with a clique, some of whom demonstrated a political ruthlessness and thuggery not seen in the Mandela era. The fight over Aids made clear that dissent would not be tolerated.

No one, apparently, was above vilification. In 2002, Mbeki's allies attempted to link three prominent ANC officials - Cyril Ramaphosa, the party's former general secretary and chief negotiator with the apartheid government, and former provincial premiers Tokyo Sexwale and Mathews Phosa - to a coup plot against the president. "The whole plot thing around Ramaphosa, Phosa and Sexwale was probably the most extreme manifestation of Mbeki's paranoia and vindictiveness, says Feinstein. "You had a minister of police going on television and announcing there's a plot against the president whereas all that was happening was that people were campaigning in upcoming regional ANC conferences on anti-Mbeki platforms. This kind of thing took its toll over the years. The other thing is, he was never personally open to anybody and therefore I think people feel very little affection for him, which makes it a lot easier for people to act against him in this sort of way but also for the real visceral hatred to build up in the way that it has."

Mbeki didn't know it but that hatred eventually manifested itself around a contagion he introduced into South African politics years earlier. Corruption was little noticed at first but in time spread through the system, infecting the government and its party, and ultimately bringing down the president. In the mid-90s South Africa was negotiating its biggest weapons buying deal ever with a clutch of arms manufacturers. There were those in the ANC and outside who asked why a relatively poor society embarking on the enormous challenge of trying to right apartheid's wrongs was spending billions of pounds on fighter jets, submarines and ships when there was no perceivable military threat. But such considerations were brushed aside as the government offered the - subsequently disproved - claim that the weapons contracts would generate large numbers of jobs.

Mbeki was deputy president at the time and headed the parliamentary subcommittee awarding the contracts. Feinstein was the highest ranking ANC member of parliament's public accounts committee that later investigated those deals. He says he came to realise that not only was the arms deal as a whole unnecessary but that it had been infected with corruption as senior officials, including the defence minister, Joe Modise, lined their pockets and the ruling party filled its coffers with what amounted to bribe money.

"I do think that it marked a profound change in South African politics in that it was the point at which the interests of Mbeki, his ruling clique and the party became more important than the national interest to the extent that they were prepared to award these contracts where there was absolutely no logic or reason to award the contracts outside of the bribes that were received," he says.

Among the examples of otherwise illogical contracts was a decision to pay £1.5bn to buy planes from BAe Systems and Saab. "Despite the fact that the air force did not want the planes, and they were two and a half times the cost of the planes the air force did want, an informal meeting involving Mbeki, Modise and others took the decision to go with them," says Feinstein.

Modise then changed the requirements of the tender, removing cost as a factor, to ensure BAe/Saab was awarded the contract. The defence secretary, Pierre Steyn, resigned. Feinstein said investigators working with his committee uncovered evidence that Modise, who has since died, received millions of rands in illegal payments from BAe and a German weapons firm.

The deals were a millstone around Mbeki's neck, and so began the cover-up. ANC members of the investigating parliamentary committee were called before party leaders including Essop Pahad, a minister and long-standing friend of Mbeki, who "launched into a ferocious diatribe".

"Who the fuck do you think you are, questioning the integrity of the government, the ministers and the president?" he said. Feinstein refused to get in line, was sacked and eventually left the party. The government got its way and a neutered report appeared that took out the auditor general's criticisms and much else.

"Mbeki was chairperson of the subcommittee that made all the decisions on the arms deal," says Feinstein. "I think that at a time when he was building up a reputation for competence, if it had been known that they took these sorts of decisions, I think it would have quite profoundly undermined his standing. It has continued to dog his presidency and raised a whole lot of questions about whether he has any interest in stamping out corruption. It seems to many people that he simply uses issues like corruption against his opponents rather than as governing principles," he says. "It was the point at which Mbeki decided he was prepared to meddle with the institutions of state or undermine certain of the institutions of democracy in order to protect himself and others in the party. A few years later, he was happy to use the deal to undermine his political opponents again, misusing the institutions of state to do that."

Mbeki initially covered for his deputy president, Jacob Zuma, when he was accused of corruption. But in 2005, Zuma's financial advisor was sentenced to 15 years in prison for procuring bribes on behalf of the deputy president from a French arms company. Mbeki sacked him. The president said he was acting in the national interest. Zuma suspected that the president had taken the opportunity to force out a growing political threat. From that followed what a high court judge recently described as a "titanic political struggle" for control of the ANC. The various interests that had come to loathe Mbeki over his policies, his style of government or his human failings coalesced around Zuma as he sought to stay out of jail by challenging the president for control of the ANC at the party's four-yearly conference in Polokwane last December.

Mbeki offered a stout if long-winded defence of his policies laying out all that he had done for the country. He was too out of touch to realise it, but the emotional tide was with Zuma. Mbeki had alienated too many people. He was swept out as ANC leader as Zuma and his allies were elected to most of the senior posts.

Mbeki was humiliated and disbelieving. But worse was to come. When prosecutors revived the corruption case against Zuma, his allies saw Mbeki's hand. Justice Chris Nicholson agreed, throwing it out earlier this month with a judgment that essentially accused the president and his cabinet of misusing the judicial system to get at Mbeki's political enemies. With that, Zuma and his allies at the top of the ANC moved and toppled Mbeki. The president had few friends and allies to defend him. They had all been driven away long ago. "What he was known for was being able to play the political game and ultimately he was defeated in his own gutter politics really," says Feinstein.

"There is the old saying that all political careers end in failure but this is a political career ending in ultimate humiliation because the ANC has been Thabo Mbeki's life. The ANC has publicly and humiliatingly cast him out."

Mbeki would like to be remembered for a growing economy, spending more per capita on poverty alleviation than any government and engineering a political deal in Zimbabwe. But millions of South Africans, such as Zackie Achmat, who was instrumental in pressuring the government to change its policies, cannot get past the huge blot of his Aids policies. "Personally, I would have liked to see him impeached for causing the deaths of many hundreds of thousands of people living with HIV; for the corruption of the arms deal; for the undermining of every independent state institution," he says.

Gevisser says all of that will remain Mbeki's legacy. "Aids is going to remain a mark on Mbeki. The arms deal will remain a mark on him as well, and more so rather than less so. I don't think it's going to go away," he says. "Everything that's happened to Mbeki is a consequence of the arms deal. If the arms deal is the poison well of South African politics, then it's Mbeki who contaminated the water".